Enrico Fermi Prize

The Enrico Fermi Prize, first awarded in 2001, is given by the Italian Physical Society (Società Italiana di Fisica). It is a yearly award of EUR 30,000 honoring one or more Members of the Society who have "particularly honoured physics with their discoveries."[1][2]

for seminal contributions to the physics of electronic and optical materials and their applications, ranging from the invention of the quantum cascade laser to the design of novel semiconductor materials, including metasurfaces

for his longstanding contribution to theoretical physics, including the study of superfluidity in liquid helium and of Van der Waals-Casimir forces, as well as for the development of the Gross-Pitaevskii theory which is a fundamental block of the physics of quantum gases

for fundamental theoretical contributions aimed to understand the optical properties of solids, in particular of surface and transport phenomena, even in extreme conditions of dimensional confinement, high temperature and pressure

for his fundamental contributions to the formation of the scientific collaborations LIGO and LIGO-Virgo and for his role in addressing various technological and scientific challenges whose solution led to the first detection of gravitational waves

for his decisive contributions in conceiving and realising the first interferometer with super-attenuators, Virgo, which made possible the quest for gravitational wave sources with an unprecedented sensitivity at low frequency

for the invention of the laser-wakefield-acceleration technique which led to a large number of fundamental and interdisciplinary applications ranging from accelerator science to plasma physics and astrophysics

for the first observation of Anderson localisation and of anomalous transport phenomena described by Lévy statistics in the framework of his highly original research on light propagation in disordered media

for the outstanding results that the five large international collaboration experiments at the CERN LHC collider – LHCb, TOTEM, ATLAS, ALICE, CMS – have achieved during the first period of LHC data taking under the successful guidance of the awardees as spokespersons

for the discovery of a molecular dynamics method known the world over as the Car-Parrinello method. This method has been a breakthrough in the field of numerical simulations, with great impact in many interdisciplinary contexts both theoretical and experimental, ranging from material science to chemistry and biology

for his contributions to the study of atomic Bose-Einstein condensates, in particular for the realization of degenerate quantum mixtures of bosons and fermions, and the invention of new experimental techniques that allowed him to obtain the first Bose-Einstein condensation of 41K atoms

for having introduced, together with S. Glashow and J. Iliopoulos, the so-called GIM mechanism which, predicting the existence of the fourth quark, allowed to solve the problem of flavour-changing neutral currents